CoroNet: A Deep Neural Network for Detection and Diagnosis of Covid-19 from Chest X-ray Images

Khan, Asif Iqbal; Shah, Junaid Latief; Bhat, Mudasir

The novel Coronavirus also called Covid-19 originated in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has now spread across the world. It has so far infected around 1.8 million people and claimed approximately 114698 lives overall. As the number of cases are rapidly increasing, most of the countries are facing shortage of testing kits and resources. The limited quantity of testing kits and increasing number of daily cases encouraged us to come up with a Deep Learning model that can aid radiologists and clinicians in detecting Covid-19 cases using chest X-rays. Therefore, in this study, we propose CoroNet, a Deep Convolutional Neural Network model to automatically detect Covid-19 infection from chest X-ray images. The deep model called CoroNet has been trained and tested on a dataset prepared by collecting Covid-19 and other chest pneumonia X-ray images from two different publically available databases. The experimental results show that our proposed model achieved an overall accuracy of 89.5%, and more importantly the precision and recall rate for Covid-19 cases are 97% and 100%. The preliminary results of this study look promising which can be further improved as more training data becomes available. Overall, the proposed model substantially advances the current radiology based methodology and during Covid-19 pandemic, it can be very helpful tool for clinical practitioners and radiologists to aid them in diagnosis, quantification and follow-up of Covid-19 cases.